You know what’s quickly starting to become a ridiculously overplayed part of the X-Men Cinematic Universe? The origin story of Wolverine. I mean, ok, I get that he is a big part of the X-Men universe, and he’s been in every X-men movie so far except for Deadpool. His origin was sort of touched on in X-men 1, X-men 2 went into much more detail as they return to Alkali Lake, Wolverine Origins gives us the details and events actually surrounding one origin of the event, Days of Future’s Past touches on it a bit with Stryker, we see it again, sort of, in Apocalypse.
How many times do we need to see this? It’s honestly not even super interesting. Maybe the upcoming Logan movie can give us a retelling of it with X-23 instead! It’s also kind of fishy and questionable about how much this film is still considered “canon”. Probably not a lot other than maybe the general idea. Obviously the events of the Adamantium infusion are different, since they show up in a different film which occurs later. Probably the most glaring part of out of canon is the Deadpool movie, which gives Deadpool a proper origin. The Deadpool film does make some reference to Wade Wilson’s time doing wetworks ops though, depicted in the early part of this film, and Ryan Reynolds plays Deadpool in both films.
Speaking of Deadpool, the biggest travesty of this film, is the butchering of Deadpool. I mean, ok, I “get” reimagining characters for the big screen. Not every character will be identical to their comic counter part, some may be quite different. There is a difference though between reimagining, and more or less name slapping a popular name on a nobody that has nothing to do with the character. Not to get too many spoilers here, but the creepy shirtless mute with Wolverine Claw style swords that shows up in this movie, isn’t Deadpool, in any way shape or form.
The other big offender here is the special effects, in particular, just how god awful they get throughout the film, especially later with Wolverine’s Adamantium claws. Considering this is like 90% of the identity of this character, the CGI is incredibly poorly done. The lighting is all off, and often they don’t properly match his arms and hands properly, especially during movement.
There is some pretty decent Wolverine action in this film, and a lot of interesting appearances by other mutants such as The Blog, and Gambit. Gambit’s almost wasted however. He shows up kind of randomly when he does pop up and despite dropping Wolverine off to his final confrontation, he doesn’t actually participate in the battle.
There is also a subplot involving Sabertooth and Wolverine being brothers at odds. As in literal blood related brothers. The opening montage shows them working together through several wars, and eventually during a special operation involving Deadpool, a skinny Blob and some other mutants, they have a falling out as Sabertooth starts to get too violent for Wolverine to handle. This whole plot point is honestly, a little awkward. Wolverine and Sabertooth have always had a confrontational sort of two sides of the same coin relationship, but they were never brothers. It’s a little bit of a weird change that doesn’t really serve a huge purpose. The implication before this revelation was they simply lived in the same household, one a servant family to the other, this kinship would have served just fine as a catalyst for their later adventures, especially coupled with their shared “problem” of being mutants.
Generally speaking, there are just soooo many flaws in this movie, both large and small, that really kind of ruin it. If you pretend Deadpool is just some sort of unnamed Super mutant and can forget about how ugly Wolverine’s claws look during many scenes, its not an awful movie, but at this point it’s also pretty much non-canon to the Xmen universe, so it’s probably not really worth bothering with.
